Humanity Only Has Around 1,000 Years Left on Earth, Stephen Hawking Predicts

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Physicist
Stephen Hawking has warned humanity that we probably only have about 1,000
years left on Earth, and the only thing that could save us from certain
extinction is setting up colonies elsewhere in the Solar System.

"[W]e
must ... continue to go into space for the future of humanity," Hawking
said in a lecture at the University of Cambridge this
week. "I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without
escaping beyond our fragile planet."

The
fate of humanity appears to have been weighing heavily on Hawking of late -
he’s also recently
cautioned that artificial intelligence (AI) will be "either the
best, or the worst, thing ever to happen to humanity".

Given
that humans are prone to making the same mistakes over and over again - even
though we’re obsessed with our own history and should know better - Hawking
suspects that "powerful autonomous weapons” could have serious
consequences for humanity. As
Heather Saul from The Independent reports, Hawking
has estimated that self-sustaining human colonies on Mars are not going to be a
viable option for another 100 years or so, which means we need to be "very
careful" in the coming decades.

Without
even taking into account the potentially devastating effects of climate
change, global pandemics brought on by antibiotic
resistance, and nuclear
capabilities of warring nations, we could soon be sparring with the
kinds of enemies we’re not even close to knowing how to deal with. Late
last year, Hawking added his name to a coalition of more than 20,000
researchers and experts, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Noam Chomsky,
calling for a ban on anyone developing autonomous weapons that can fire on
targets without human intervention.

As
the founders of OpenAI, Musk’s new
research initiative dedicated to the ethics of artificial intelligence, said
last year, our robots are perfectly submissive now, but what happens
when we remove one too many restrictions? What happens when you make them
so perfect, they’re just like humans, but better, just like we've always
wanted?

"AI
systems today have impressive but narrow capabilities, it seems that we'll keep
whittling away at their constraints, and in the extreme case they will reach
human performance on virtually every intellectual task. It's hard to fathom how
much human-level AI could benefit society, and it's equally hard to imagine how
much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly." the
founders said.

And
that’s not even the half of it.

Imagine
we’re dealing with unruly robots that are so much smarter and so much stronger
than us, and suddenly, we get the announcement - aliens have picked up on the
signals we’ve been blasting out into the Universe and made contract. Great
news, right? Well, think about it for a minute. In the coming decades, Earth
and humanity isn’t going to look so crash-hot.

We’ll
be struggling to mitigate the effects of climate change, which means we'll be
running out of land to grow crops, our
coasts will be disappearing, and anything edible in the sea is
probably being cooked by the rapidly rising temperatures. If the
aliens are aggressive, they’ll see a weakened enemy with a habitable planet
that’s ripe for the taking. And even if they’re non-aggressive, we humans
certainly are, so we’ll probably try to get a share of what they’ve got, and
oops: alien wars.

As
Hawking says in his new online film, Stephen Hawking’s
Favourite Places, "I am more convinced than ever that we are not
alone," but if the aliens are finding us, "they will be vastly
more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see
bacteria".

Clearly,
we need a back-up plan, which is why Hawking's 1,000-year deadline to
destruction comes with a caveat - we might be able to survive our mistakes if
we have somewhere else in the Solar System to jettison ourselves to. That all
might sound pretty dire, but Hawking says we still have a whole lot to feel
optimistic about, describing
2016 as a "glorious time to be alive and doing research into theoretical
physics".

While John
Oliver might disagree that there's anything good about 2016 at all,
Hawking says we need to "Remember to look up at the stars and not down at
your feet."

"Try
to make sense of what you see, wonder about what makes the Universe exist. Be
curious," he
told students at the Cambridge lecture. "However difficult life
may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that
you don’t just give up."